I hesitated to post this because, well, there's already soooo many 10.5 post-Journey's End stories out there and many of them are sweet and sad and already say a lot of what I say in this one. But I suppose everyone's entitled to one or two completely self indulgent stories, and it was cluttering up my 'unfinished' folder when really it was finished so... ;-) The title is because I had a hazy recollection of a historical titbit about exiled men being sent to stand in the ocean and wait for a ship out of the country and the beach image seemed to suit the idea and when I went looking "abjuration" is what wiki presented me with!

(With thanks to Hawki for the six year old typo corrections!)

It wasn't the first time he'd made such a choice. Chosen and hated himself for choosing and both regretting it and accepting it as a consequence of being in a position to chose at all.

Except this time there was a walking talking part of himself, able to voice that hatred of the decision. Able to stare him in the face, calm and cold and condemn him.

He didn't argue. What was the point? He already knew all the arguments. How could he not? They were his arguments. If he hadn't already chosen, perhaps his other self would have had to.

Was it the human biology that had made his choice the faster? The pounding adrenalin stirred through his veins by that single, but so-fast heart?

He didn't know. And he didn't argue because he understood.

If he could have both made and rejected the choices he had been forced to, then he would have done it. And his other self, the Time Lord self, had that luxury.

He could choose to believe that he would have chosen differently, found a different way.

As if there had ever been any other way with the Daleks. As if he hadn't already both destroyed them and refused to and regretted both.

So he didn't argue in the TARDIS, while the others laughed and chatted around the console, and his other self told him where he was taking them.

It's not even as if that was new.

He'd been judged before. Exiled before.

This time the sop to the hurt was Rose.

Last time it had been the Earth. Judged and condemned and exiled. For interfering. For making the choices that no one would admit had to be made. Forced to regenerate, in confusion and dismay and against his will. Stripped of his companions, stripped of his control of the TARDIS and then dumped, still barely conscious on the very planet he'd been unable to refuse to save.

Washed off Time Lord hands so they could hold the moral high ground.

He shivered, on the freezing beach, his mind straying back to the damp woodland where he'd found himself on that occasion, the cold sea air a too physical reminder. He thought he'd lost as much as it was possible to lose then.

He'd been wrong.

Because now Rose is looking at him like a stranger and doesn't even trouble to lower her voice as she tells his other self, "He's not you."

He stifles the indignant reply that rises to his lips, the urge to point out that he's standing right here. Senses something of Donna in the reaction and flinches again because he knows how that has to end as well. Another companion forced to forget him and this time it's worst because this time it's him who'll have to do it. He doesn't envy his other self that task at least.

Rose turns back to him and slowly, when prompted, he explains the crucial difference between him and his Time Lord self, not knowing if it'll be enough to erase that disappointed appraisal in her eyes.

And in the end he knows that whether it does or not, he'll stay with her for as long as she'll have him, even if he has to live with the knowledge that he's the second choice, the consolation prize.

The sop to ease the decisions that have to be made and which their makers would prefer to be able to deny.

He's had nine centuries of practise.

And because he knows himself pretty well after those nine hundred years he knows that it's not only the blame for the extinction of the Daleks which his other self had neatly managed to avoid. He's also sidestepped the agonising choice between giving Rose up and watching her age and die, of taking away her chance of a normal life.

He admires the chilly neatness of the solution. He should - he thought of it. Or close enough.

He gets Rose as a consolation for being stranded here. Rose gets him as consolation for losing what she probably still thinks of as the real thing. And his other self?

He's not sure what he gets out of it. The moral high ground again maybe.

-END-